As of today, women can get free contraceptives and abortifacients, as well as other goodies that their insurance will have to give them without co-pays to doctors:

Democrats hailed the Aug. 1 introduction of these Affordable Care Act services as a turning point at which the American public would finally grasp the magnitude of healthcare reform.

The new services that will be required to be offered under insurance plans without a co-payment are well-woman visits, gestational diabetes screening, domestic violence screening and counseling, contraception and contraceptive counseling, breastfeeding support and supplies, HPV DNA testings, sexually transmitted infections counseling, and HIV screening and counseling.

Health & Human Services considers “morning after pills,” “week after pills,” and other measures that prevent the embryo from attaching to the womb or that cause expulsion to be “contraceptives.” For those who believe life begins at conception, that is abortion. And we are all going to be paying for that, even if your religion forbids it.

A former student wrote me after the Aurora shootings saying that a friend of his was in the theater and had been shot. He said she was from an active homeschooling family, a leader in the Colorado homeschool debate league, and a committed Christian, very much like our other students. He was distraught about it, and the parallels with our other students made the shootings disturbingly real to me.

A few days later, my student updated me about how his friend’s life was providentially, if not miraculously, spared. I’ll let NBC News tell the story:

Petra Anderson, one of 58 people injured in the Aurora movie theater attack, is lucky to be alive.

Anderson, a 22-year-old aspiring music professor, was hit by a shotgun blast during the assault that killed 12 people. Three pellets struck her arm and one rocketed through her head, but it missed the brain’s many blood vessels and key sections controlling vital functions, according to her doctor.

“If the pellet had wavered a millimeter, really in any direction from what it actually took, then she would have likely either died or been severely injured,” said Dr. Michael Rauzzino, a neurosurgeon at The Medical Center of Aurora who operated on Anderson to remove the pellet. “I would say this is definitely a miracle,” he said, while showing an MRI of Anderson’s brain.

The MRI reveals a faint trace of the pellet’s path after it entered the left side of Petra’s nose, broke through the front of her skull, and passed through her brain, before lodging in the back of her head. . . .

“It would be hard to create a path similar to this where it goes all the way from the front to the back and misses every single blood vessel, doesn’t bother any of the major structures, and leaves her able to talk and move everything and not be paralyzed or dead,” he added. “Never in my entire career have I seen a case where a bullet has traversed the entire brain like this and not caused severe damage or death.”

At first the report was that she was saved by a birth defect–a channel in her brain that the pellet exactly followed–but the doctor says now that this was not the case. The pellet just went through her brain missing every blood vessel and vital structures. That’s miraculous enough. I know it’s hard to talk about such things, given the people who were not spared, but still, this is remarkable.

Discussion about the Obamacare contraception/abortifacient insurance mandate has centered on the religious liberty of church-related institutions. But what about the religious liberty of pro-life individuals who own businesses? That, in fact, is the case before the courts that might have a ruling today. (I’m on the road so I might have trouble monitoring it. If anyone hears about a ruling, mention it in a comment.) Here are details about that case, with a rather chilling statement about how the Obama administration sees religious liberty:

Hercules Industries is a Colorado based corporation that makes heating and air conditioning equipment. Hercules is a family-owned business. Its owners, the Newland brothers — William (pictured), Paul and James — and their sister, Christine Ketterhagen, take their Catholic faith seriously. The business provides good jobs for 265 people and Hercules Industries tries hard to be a good member of the community. The siblings who operate the business have always assumed that they had the right to live according to their faith, like other businesses across our nation.

In those parts of New York City that have a high percentage of residents who are Orthodox or Hassidic Jews, businesses close when the sun sets on Friday and stay closed until sunset on Saturday, in observance of the Sabbath. Kosher butchers do not sell pork and Kosher delis do not make pork sandwiches. This sort of religious freedom is not peripheral to religious Americans of all professions. It is central to their idea of the American dream.

This is consistent with what the Newlands believe. The health benefits packages that Hercules Industries provides to its employees is very generous, but it does not include sterilization, artificial contraception or abortifacients. Individuals who work for the company are free, of course, to obtain these at their own expense or to secure insurance coverage outside the company health plan that covers those types of expenses.

The Newlands have brought suit against Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for regulations she has promulgated that require that any company employing more than 50 people must include those medical procedures and drugs in the health plan. The Hercules Industry lawsuit states:

The Catholic Church teaches that abortifacient drugs, contraception and sterilization are intrinsic evils. Consequently, the Newlands believe that it would be immoral and sinful for them to intentionally participate in, pay for, facilitate or otherwise support abortifacient drugs, contraception, sterilization, and related education and counseling as would be required by the Mandate, through their inclusion in health insurance coverage they offer at Hercules.

The Obama administration has resisted the Hercules lawsuit by claiming that the company is secular, and therefore entitled to no First Amendment protection, with the Department of Justice telling the court:

The First Amendment Complaint does not allege that the company is affiliated with a formally religious entity such as a church, nor does it allege that the company employs persons of a particular faith. In short, Hercules Industries is plainly a for-profit, secular employer. By definition, a secular employer does not engage in any “exercise of religion.” It is well established that a corporation and its owners are wholly separate entities, and the Court should not permit the Newlands to eliminate that legal separation to impose their personal religious beliefs on the corporate entity or its employees.

The Obamacare mandate that requires pro-life institutions and business owners to provide insurance for their employees that gives free contraceptives and abortion drugs goes into effect this Wednesday, August 1. Perhaps you didn’t realize this was so imminent.

On Friday, a court is scheduled to issue a ruling on the case, which might overturn the mandate or might affirm it.

Elton John gives credit to George W. Bush and to conservatives for their efforts in slowing the AIDS epidemic in Africa:

“We’ve seen George W. Bush and conservative American politicians pledge tens of billions to save the lives of Africans with HIV. Think of all the love. Think of where we’d be without it, nowhere, that’s where. We’d be nowhere at all,” John said at the International AIDS conference in Washington on Monday.

“Thanks to all this compassion, thanks to all this love, more than 8 million people are on treatment. Thanks to people who have chosen to care and to act, we can see an end to this epidemic on the horizon.”

So what will happen if religious and other pro-life institutions refuse to go along with the Obamacare contraceptive and abortifacient mandate?

Under President Obama’s healthcare law, the HHS can levy $100 per employee, per day against institutions that won’t comply with the mandate.

Therefore, religious employers with hundreds of employees could be fined millions of dollars each year. A 50-employee institution, for example, would face a penalty of $1,825,000 each year.

“ObamaCare gives the federal government the tools to tax religiously affiliated schools, hospitals, universities and soup kitchens right out of existence,” said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), sponsor of the Religious Freedom Tax Repeal Act.

Using the language that the Supreme Court recently decided covered the penalties in ObamaCare, Sensenbrenner cites a February report by the Congressional Research Service that adds up the noncompliance tax to $36,500 annually per employee. Any group health plan and health insurance issuer subject to insurance market reforms in Title I of the Affordable Care Act that objects to coverage requirements based on religious and moral convictions does not qualify for an exemption.